A three-year research project is investigating theevolution of social (business) networks in an eMarket environment. To address this issue a complete, immersive, distributed virtual trading environment has been constructed. That environment is described here. Virtual worlds technology provides an immersive environment inwhich traders are represented as avatars that interact with each other, and have access to market data and general information that is delivered by data and text mining machinery. To enrich this essentially social market place, synthetic bots have also been constructed. They too are represented by avatars, and provide rdquoinformed idle chatterrdquo so enriching the social fabric. They acquire their information with text and datamining machinery that continually scans market data and general financial news feeds. The middle-ware in this environment is based onpowerful multiagent technology that manages all processes including the information delivery and data mining. The investigation ofnetwork evolution leads to the development of ldquonetwork miningrdquo techniques.

A three-year research project is investigating theevolution of social (business) networks in an eMarket environment. To address this issue a complete, immersive, distributed virtual trading environment has been constructed. That environment is described here. Virtual worlds technology provides an immersive environment inwhich traders are represented as avatars that interact with each other, and have access to market data and general information that is delivered by data and text mining machinery. To enrich this essentially social market place, synthetic bots have also been constructed. They too are represented by avatars, and provide rdquoinformed idle chatterrdquo so enriching the social fabric. They acquire their information with text and datamining machinery that continually scans market data and general financial news feeds. The middle-ware in this environment is based onpowerful multiagent technology that manages all processes including the information delivery and data mining. The investigation ofnetwork evolution leads to the development of ldquonetwork miningrdquo techniques.